Nature Photography How To

The below instructional video from longtime pro photographer Moose Peterson is from a few years ago but if you haven't seen it yet, it has some great advice on how to capture gorgeous landscape photos.

You might say that images from distant, exotic locations are the stock and trade of a professional travel photographer, and certainly in my case you’d be mostly right. Those images pay off commercially and artistically, and when I can make them in places I’ve never before visited, they provide the added satisfaction of exploration and discovery.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in northeastern Alaska consists of 19,286,722 acres along the Alaskan North Slope, and supports a greater diversity of flora and fauna than anywhere else in the Arctic Circle. It was established in 1960 and is governed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It receives only about 1,500 visitors a year.

Telephotos have always been bread-and-butter lenses for photographers shooting everything from commercial and sports to wildlife and landscapes. The ability to separate a subject against its background or pull in a distant scene has made telephoto lenses a staple in nearly every camera bag around the world.

There’s no reason to pack your photo gear away when the first snows of winter start to fly. Winter photography presents some of the most wonderful opportunities to capture stunning subject matter that is not available during other times of the year. With the ground enveloped in a blanket of white snow, even familiar surroundings will take on an entirely different perspective and serve as the background for new and exciting images.

For centuries, scientists have labored to understand the nature of light. Some ancient Greeks believed that light was emitted from the eyeball the same way a bat sends out an echolocation chirp which allows him to determine his precise position in physical space. Understandably, there were problems with that hypothesis. Other theories followed. Those who embraced the wave theory were right—mostly. Light behaves like a wave up to a certain point. Similarly, those who professed the particle theory were also correct—partly.

Every photographer has a personal vision and a particular taste in composition, light, color and so on. For example, many photographers chose nature’s details simply to abstract the color and form they find. Others like to use extremely shallow depth of field—also called selective focus—so only a sliver of the subject is sharp while the rest of it is soft. People who are intrigued by the beauty, intricacy and complexity of nature usually shoot with the opposite approach. They want to reveal as much detail in the subjects as possible so those who view their work can appreciate the designs and the patterns in the images with tack sharp clarity.